Buddha to Krishna

BUDDHA TO KRISHNA

This book traces the emergence of modernism in art in South Asia by exploring the work of the iconic artist George Keyt. Closely interwoven with his life, Keyt’s art reflects the struggle and triumph of an artist with very little support or infrastructure. He painted as he lived: full of colour, turmoil and intensity. In this compelling account, the author examines the eventful course of Keyt’s journey, bringing to light unknown and star- tling facts: the personal ferment that Keyt went through because of his tumultuous relationships with women; his close involvement with social events in India and Sri Lanka on the threshold of Independence; and his somewhat angular engagement with artists of the ’43 Group. A collector’s delight, including colour plates and black and white pho- tographs, reminiscences and intimate correspondences, this book reveals the portrait of an artist among the most charismatic figures of our time. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of art and art history, modern South Asian studies, sociology, cultural studies as well as art aficionados.

Yashodhara Dalmia is an art historian and independent curator based in New Delhi, India. She has written several books including Amrita Sher- Gil: A Life (2006) that have received widespread international acclaim. She is also the author of The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (2001) and Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists (2011). She has curated many art shows, with the most recent being the centenary show ‘Amrita Sher-Gil: The Passionate Quest’ at the National Gallery of Mod- ern Art in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru in 2014.

BUDDHA TO KRISHNA

Life and Times of George Keyt

Yashodhara Dalmia First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Yashodhara Dalmia The right of Yashodhara Dalmia to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-23272-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-31145-6 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC FOR MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

List of plates ix List of figures x Preface xi Acknowledgements xiv

1 A fine start 1

2 Valley of romance 15

3 Away and beyond 34

4 Buddhism and sensuality 51

5 The ’43 Group and modernism unfolds 66

6 The Indian encounter 96

7 The saga of Manike 112

8 Martin’s journey 121

9 Internationalism and fame 145

10 New pastures, fecund fields 163

vii Contents

11 The final years 186

12 The flaming torch 205

Index 214

viii PLATES

I Kandyan Portrait II Portrait of Govindamma III Sringara Rasa IV Maheshvara V Jalaja VIa Mahamaya’s Dream VIb At the Palace with Yashodhara VII The Journey VIII Woman with Sheaf IX Ploughing X Sringar XI Girl Singing XII Bhima and Jarasandha XIII Girl with Mirror XIV Friends XV Tilak XVI Radha and Krishna

ix FIGURES

1.1 George Keyt 8 2.1 Ruth Keyt nee Jansz 16 2.2 George Keyt with his daughter Diana 19 2.3 Flavia Keyt 27 3.1 George and Manike 37 3.2 Nayika and Sakhi 39 3.3 Sigiriya maidens 41 4.1 Defeat of Mara and his daughters 56 4.2 Mara’s demonic army surrounding the Buddha 59 4.3 Forces of Mara 60 5.1 The ’43 Group 69 5.2 Key to the ’43 Group 76 5.3 Portrait of Lionel Wendt 77 5.4 Portrait of Niloufer 79 5.5 The Wave 81 5.6 Seated nude 84 5.7 Blue horse 86 5.8 Female figure 88 5.9 Three figures, baby and tortoise 91 6.1 Lalita Ragini 108 7.1 Manike and Anil de Silva 113 8.1 Martin, Anne, Julian and Stephen 127 8.2 Portrait of Russell’s soul in the guise of a Kandyan peasant 130 9.1 George holding his painting at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 1975 155 10.1 Kusum Reading 165 11.1 Draupadi 191 12.1 Still life with wild flowers 210

x PREFACE

One of the most enigmatic of artists, George Keyt’s paintings intrigue and tantalize. His bold, sensuous forms delineated with definitive strokes both reveal and conceal, are decorative yet edgy, modern but also ancient. A glimpse of these makes one wonder about the man behind these strangely captivating works. Yet to understand his persona is to take a path which criss-crosses other trajectories that are equally complex. Mapping this uncharted terrain took me to Sri Lanka, the land of his birth, where it became evident that George Keyt was a charismatic figure and that his name aroused more than reverence. Covering a lifespan of 92 years (1901–93) Keyt, a Burgher, of Eurasian descent, is of impor- tance not only because his work was to pioneer modernism in art in the subcontinent but also because he was the first modern Buddhist artist from South Asia and hence aroused interest in the international sphere. Keyt’s painting of Buddha’s life in the Gotami Vihara in Colombo is a lucid narration of a sensual, open-ended Buddhism that he suggested needs to be inscribed into the creation of an independent country. For this Keyt archived a gamut of artistic practices from the indigenous Sigiriya murals to the Cubist dissection of forms. The artist’s explorations in Hindu mythology and Indian literature led George to have close links with the cultural life of India, where he lived for long and short periods from 1939 right up to the late 1970s. To the Sri Lankan Buddhist sources were added the imagery of Hindu myth and legend as key influences that led to an art of great sensuality and lyricism. In their bold, robust forms and brilliant colours Keyt was to fuse the East and West and, not unlike Amrita Sher-Gil the Indo-Hungarian artist, was to influence successive generations of artists. In his close association with Indian painters like Francis Souza and M.F. Husain he was also to spear- head an emphatic modernism in the subcontinent.

xi Preface

The drama of Keyt’s life is heightened by the fact that his ancestor, interestingly enough, was a British officer posted in Hyderabad where his liaison with a courtesan from the Nizam’s court led to his expulsion from India and his basing himself in Ceylon. George’s own tempestuous life, which infused his art, led him to renounce his wife and live with the maid who looked after his children and move to her village in Sri Lanka. Subsequently he was besotted by an Indian lady from Bombay and was to marry her and spend the last three decades of his life with her. Keyt’s life acquires another dimension because of his close friendship with an Eng- lishman, Martin Russell, who went back to London and was to interact with him over a prolific correspondence until the end. Russell (nephew of the famed Bertrand Russell) also popularized his work abroad and placed him firmly in the international arena. The life and works of George Keyt, apart from their condensed energy that pioneered modernism, also reflect the social history of the period with all its dramatic upheavals. In his delineation of figures and their specific physiognomies and period costumes, in the archiving of mythology to reflect the struggle against colonialism and in the reflection of life lived by ordinary folk in colonial and post-colonial situations we have a tel- escopic view of events as they spanned the 20th century. The Sri Lankan landscape embedded with a palimpsest of cultures provided the rich matrix for George’s paintings. It was to lead him to India where the country was reverberating with all the energy of a newly found independence and George was to draw from it for many of his works. His international fame followed where Keyt’s name resounded modernity in the subcontinent in a manner that was distinctive and specific. It was no wonder that the poet Pablo Neruda, writing of his works, mentions that ‘These figures take on a strange expressive grandeur, and radiate an aura of intensely profound feeling.’ In tracking Keyt’s journey I made my way to Melbourne and to a memorable visit to the oldest surviving member of the ’43 Group, Richard Gabriel, in November 2011. He was in his late eighties, but his mind was vividly alive with narratives of the Group and his engagement with it. Richard took me around his studio in the outskirts of Melbourne, which was like a gallery of paintings, each one a Pandora’s box of events. A sumptuous Sri Lankan meal followed, making it into a morning which one could not forget easily. I was fortunate to have met him just then for he passed away five years later, leaving behind everlasting memories. In my visits to London and to Dorset to the home of his closest friend, Martin Russell, I was to find another rich source of correspondence and

xii Preface memorabilia. The paintings and drawings of Keyt lined the Dorset cottage, making his home a virtual museum of George Keyt. It was equally memorable to meet Martin’s wife Anne who was on a wheelchair and in considerable ill health but was a gracious hostess and took pains to furnish us with essential details of the friendship. Her passing away in 2013 left very few people, barring his own family, who were close to George and remembered his days with such clarity. In turning it over I think what drew me to work on this biography was to archive the embedded layers that brought about modern art in the subcontinent. The pioneering works of Keyt left behind a legacy that others were to follow. In unravelling some of the processes that went behind this journey I hope to also have uncovered his isolation, desolation and struggle to survive at a time of considerable personal ferment, some of it of his own making, which led him to the edge of an abyss. This was also a period when there was little infrastructure and almost no market for art and for his work. At that time, he had little money and until the end would be in need of it for ordinary day-to-day things. The contrast with his market today almost surpasses comparison. Yet he had to struggle without much support or recognition and with very little means to leave behind works that have considerable depth and grandeur. It seems appropriate to end with a few lines from the poem on Keyt written by the poet Keki N. Daruwalla entitled The World of George Keyt:

For everything palpitates here. The sandal coloured limbs pulse with ichor. The green is brighter than a parrot’s plumage and takes off. The yellows are a quest for light. The palette vibrates with the warmth of flesh tones and overwhelms the senses like the bursting of a musk-pod.

xiii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been made possible with the help and support of the Mar- tin Russell family and my heartfelt thanks to all of them. If Martin Rus- sell was George Keyt’s closest friend and supporter, it is his family whose open-hearted cooperation enabled me to write this biography on him. In particular, I would like to thank his son Julian Russell who opened his father’s archives in London and allowed me to spend hours sifting through the papers and also generously took time off from his busy sched- ule to speak about the complex phenomena of this iconic artist. Julian also facilitated a visit to his mother, the late Anne Russell, in her pictur- esque cottage in Dorset. In a state of considerable ill health, she managed to sit up and speak to us for she pointed out that George was Martin’s closest friend. The visit to the cottage where Martin had spent his last years also proved to be very helpful in the material it yielded for the book. I would also like to thank Julian’s sisters, Laura and Emily, for their support. George Keyt’s own family has dispersed, but it was very useful to interact with his daughters Diana and Flavia for their many insights into George and their vivid memories of their growing-up years. Lionel Peiris and Damayanti Peiris, George’s nephew and niece, are to be thanked for the many hours spent in divulging information about the family. I would also like to thank the solicitor Michael Sproule, George’s nephew, for the useful information provided by him. I am grateful to Cedric de Silva, Chairman, George Keyt Foundation, and his wife Sita de Silva for their support. Heartfelt thanks to Deborah Philip for her meticulous research for this project. I am grateful to L.S.D. Peiris, Secretary of the Sapumal Foundation, for his help in introducing me to the Sri Lankan art scene and in particular the ’43 Group.

xiv Acknowledgements

It was very moving to meet the well-known film-maker Lester James Peries and his wife Sumitra at their ambient home in Colombo. Though he was over 90, his vivid recall of the formation of the ’43 Group, where he was present, and its subsequent development as well as his memories of George proved immensely useful. The scholar Neloufer de Mel is to be thanked for her writings and for her generous help. I am also grateful to Kumari Jayawardena, the cultural theorist and writer, for her insights and her writings. Arjun Daraniyagala, Justin Daraniyagala’s nephew, is to be thanked for his help in understanding his illustrious uncle. The oldest surviving member of the ’43 Group, the late Richard Gabriel, met us in his studio at Melbourne and is to be thanked posthumously for the immense trouble he took, despite his age and illness, to provide information and knowledge about the Group. I am grateful to Richard’s daughter and her husband, Mr and Mrs Hiran Leidan, for facilitating this valuable meeting. Heartfelt thanks to the art historian and artist Nev- ille Weeraratne, the author of the authoritative book, ’43 Group, and his charming wife Sybil Keyt for the time spent at their home in Melbourne and for the information provided by them. I would also like to thank Esmeralda Claessen and her husband for the hours spent at their home, also George Claessen’s studio in London, for their help. I owe a debt of gratitude to Nathan Sivasambu, the founder and the initiator of the Cey- lon Bloomsbury Group and the ’43 Group Colombo London, for his knowl- edgeable support and information provided on the Group. Asha Seth and her daughter, the photographer Ketaki Seth, are to be thanked for their help and warm support for this project. I am grateful to the poet Keki N. Daruwalla, who was associated with George Keyt and has written a poem on him, for allowing me to use his poem and for his insights. The many writers and poets who have contributed to the making of this book by their writings are numerous and I would like to thank all of them for making this volume possible. My heartfelt thanks to Dr Shashank Sinha, Publishing Director, Rout- ledge India, and the entire team in Delhi for the immense care they have taken over this volume. I am also grateful to Routledge UK for bringing about this book. This work is dedicated to my mother Saraswati Dalmia for her profound cultural and literary influence on me and the family. A writer and scholar herself, she sowed the first seed and lovingly nurtured its growth. My sister Vasudha Dalmia is to be thanked for her scholarly inputs and her warm encouragement for this project.

xv Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank my niece Gauri Agarwal, of Sotheby’s, Lon- don, for her invaluable help for this book. My gratitude to the Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perera, based in Delhi, for her many insights into the art scene in Sri Lanka. Last and not least, I am grateful to Maseeh Rahman for his many insights and his constant intellectual and material support in making this book possible.

xvi 1 A FINE START

His life stretched across the entire 20th century and was witness to its triumphs and upheavals. Added to that was the drama of his own journey which was as intense as his creations in paint and poetry. George Keyt, the painter known for his voluptuous, sensual, spiritual and modern works, was born on April 1901 in Kandy, the Sri Lankan hill station, with its resplendent scenery and long tradition of history and culture. Kandy is Sri Lanka’s second city after Colombo and was preferred by colonials because of its cooler climate and scenic beauty with its lakeland setting and hilly surroundings. Its many old colonial buildings and the tea plantations in its vicinity testify to their emphatic presence in the last century. Kandy’s biggest draw, however, is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, where a tooth relic of Lord Buddha is kept in a golden casket and a sumptuous annual festival takes place to celebrate this. Ironically enough it was the only town that did not have colonial rulers until it finally succumbed to the British in 1815. The colonial encounter with Sri Lanka spanned four centuries, with the first ship of the Portuguese arriving around 1505 and the domination of the Western powers lasting till 1948. The Portuguese rule (1505/6– 1658) was followed by the Dutch occupation (1658–1796) until the Brit- ish (1796–1948) finally overpowered them and ruled till Independence in 1948. There have been few Asian countries that have had such a lengthy imperial rule under colonial powers as Sri Lanka, and it had a profound impact on its development and culture. But even when the British had occupied most of the country, the proud Kandyan chiefs did not succumb and it was only in 1815 and partly due to internal intrigue that the city gave in. The kingdom’s remote location came to an end as roads were built from all cardinal directions into the city and plantations inhabited the surrounding landscape as the government set up its alternative head- quarters here. The long and rich tradition of music, dance, drama and

1 A fine start ritual however took its own course, as did the famous Buddhist temple that housed the Buddha’s tooth relic. For most in Sri Lanka, traditional Kandyan culture is seen as representative of the country’s indigenous wealth. The first king of Kandy, Vimaladharmasuriya, who came to power in the early days or in the ‘year two thousand, one hundred and thirty-five from the nirvana of the Master’ and had Buddha’s tooth relic fetched from the province of Saparagamu and had a relic temple erected in the neigh- bourhood of the royal palace, may not have been pleased with the turn of history but would have been satisfied with the continuation of its culture.1 In many ways Kandy had not changed much since the days when the British writer Leonard Woolf had been posted there in 1907. In his time it had a population of 30,000 and was full of ‘white men’. As he mentioned in his autobiographical account Growing about the time he spent in Sri Lanka,

I’m glad that I spent a year of my life at twenty-seven in Kandy, for life there was unlike any that I had ever known elsewhere, but I did not like it in the way that I liked Jaffna or Hambantota, and it did a good deal to complete my education as an anti-imperialist.

His main observation about Kandy was that Europeanizing of the non- Europeans was a mistake. Leonard wrote to Lytton Strachey, his close friend from his Trinity College days in Cambridge:

The Kandyan grovels on the ground and touches your boots, but has retained his independence and his manners . . . I certainly, all through my life in Ceylon enjoyed my position and the flattery of being the great man and the father of the people. That was why, as time went on, I became more and more ambivalent, politically schizophrenic, an anti-imperialist who enjoyed the flesh pots of imperialism, loved the subject peoples and their way of life, and knew from the inside how evil the system was beneath the surface for ordinary men and women.2

Leonard Woolf had joined the Civil Service and had been posted in Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was then known, in 1904. He moved in different parts of the country from Colombo to Jaffna and Kandy and it grew on him to his very bones. He returned to England in May 1911 and soon after married Virginia Stephen who was along with her husband a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. He also wrote the famed novel The Village

2 A fine start

in the Jungle only two months after his return and it was published in 1913. It not only made record sales in the United Kingdom but was trans- lated into Sinhalese and became an essential part of the literary culture of Sri Lanka. Leonard wrote in Growing:

One of the charms of the island is its infinite variety. In the north, east and south-east you get the flat, dry, hot low country with a very small rainfall which comes mainly in a month or so of the north-east monsoon. It is a land of silent, sinister scrub jungle, or of great stretches of sand broken occasionally by clumps of low blackish shrubs, the vast dry lagoons in which, as you cross them under the blazing sun, you continually see in the thickening distance the mirage of water, a great non-existent lake sometimes surrounded by non-existent coconut or palmyra palms. This is a country of sand and sun, an enormous blue sky stretching away unbroken to an immensely distant horizon. Many people dislike the arid sterility of this kind of Asiatic low country. But I lived in it for many years . . . and it grows into my heart and my bones.3

Christopher Ondaatje mentions that after spending long hours at work Woolf while in Kandy would play tennis, squash and hockey. His day would end at the Kandy Club for a drink, bridge, billiards and dinner, and it was here that he experienced the centre of British imperialism with all its amplifications.4

George Keyt country If Kandy was the last post of the white man where he was free to make much of his position and power and it is described graphically in Woolf’s various writings, it was also George Keyt country and the landscape of his artistic world. George’s origins themselves here were as colourful as his life. According to his biographer and close friend, the Englishman Mar- tin Russell, his ancestor was John Thomas Keyt of the 51st Regiment of Foot, Yorkshire Regiment. While serving in the British army in India he eloped with a Begum’s daughter in Hyderabad and escaped to Sri Lanka as her people were out to kill him. His son Henry Keyt (1802–67) served in the Ceylon civil service as assistant colonial secretary and married Louisa Elizabeth van der Smagt in the Dutch Reformed Church on 4 Novem- ber 1839. Their son, Fredrick Theobald Keyt (1842–1904), was an MD

3 A fine start from Aberdeen and served as a colonial surgeon in the Ceylon Medical Department and married Mary Elgin Dickman. But it was his second wife Elizabeth Henrietta Krickenbeeck, daughter of Frederick Justinus Kricken- beeck and Elizabeth Adrianne Toussaint, who was George’s grandmother. The son born to them Henry Keyt (1867–1927), George’s father, married Constance Evelyn Sproule, daughter of James Hugh Sproule, Proctor, and Gertrude Arabella Pierez. Their son, George Percival Sproule Keyt, was born on 17 April 1901.5 The family account, however, states that their first ancestor was work- ing for the Dutch East India Company in India and fell in love with a courtesan from the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad. As a result his embarrassed employers asked him to leave the service. He then joined the British and was posted in Ceylon where he worked as a civil servant. He went with the English to fight the battle of Waterloo where he was killed. In recognition of his services, his wife and children were supported by the British. His Irish relatives, for he originally came from Drogheda in Ire- land, came to Ceylon to ask for his children, but the dancing girl refused to give up the boy. The girl went with her father’s family to Ireland and is lost to the family history. This narrative which was provided by the eldest daughter of George, Diana Keyt, goes on to mention that their ancestry consisted of the Dutch Burghers of Ceylon who were descendants of French Huguenots, Portu- guese settler families and citizens of the low countries. She states:

As a child, I remember our government archivist, Jan Paulusz, showing us the huge leather bound books (Thombus) which held our family records. He showed me a name – Johanna van der Witt – and said ‘She was your ancestor. She came here when she was 14 years old with her family’, and then he showed me the family names I knew, the Krickenbeecks, the van der Smagts and so on. Through my mother and my father I am descended from two governors of Ceylon. When my sister was a student in Germany she became interested in our family tree and did some research from the church records in Europe. We had always been told by older family members that my father’s curly black hair and pale blue eyes were ‘his Jewish blood coming through’. Since the ancestor they claimed was a Jew was named ‘Toussaint’, we were skeptical. But my sister found that he had indeed once been Jew originally named Ari Goldenstein who had worked for Frederick the Great in Potsdam helping finance his battles. Somehow he

4 A fine start

decided not to be a Jew any longer and went to the low countries where he became a Christian and took the name of Harry (Henry) Toussaint.6

It seems that Constance, George’s mother, belonged to an Irish Burgher family where there was a Portuguese connection as well. Flavia Keyt speaks of it and so does Diana when she states that:

Many years ago there were still in Kandy, decaying mansions of the Portuguese gentry. On one of our afternoon calling days, Nana and I went to an area of dark little narrow streets and entered a large gloomy house. We went in to visit two ancient ladies, resplendent in outdated European clothes, who spoke with my grandmother in Portuguese. . . . These were maiden sisters of her mother, who had been a Pirez. . . . They were very slim and had grave aquiline faces with pale, olive skins . . .7

Little more is known of the daring ancestor who seems to have broken the iron curtain to elope with a Muslim girl, which was nothing short of courageous. The family account names him as Henry Keyt and that he was born in 1802, but in that case he could hardly have fought the battle of Waterloo in 1815. If we go by the fact that it was John Thomas Keyt who eloped with the Begum’s daughter when serving in the British army in India he could then well have fought in the battle of Waterloo when he would be in his late twenties or early thirties. This would also tally with other narratives of similar incidents around the turn of the 18th century. In William Dalrymple’s narrative in The White Mughals we have James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident at the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805. He had apparently adopted Hyderabadi ways of living and clothes and shortly after arriving had fallen in love with the great niece of the diwan (Prime Minister) of Hyderabad. He married Khair un-Nissa, or ‘Most Excellent Among Women’, in 1800 according to Mus- lim law for he had converted to Islam to marry his bride. After a great deal of digging Dalrymple also stumbled on an account of a meeting between the young couple at the India Office Library which recounted in Kirkpat- rick’s own writing the fact that she was irrevocably in love with him and prepared to go through any fiery ordeal. The book recounts the tragic story of their relationship where in the end the daughter is taken away at the age of four to England and baptised and then completely cut off from her maternal relations. Absorbed into the upper crust of Victorian society as

5 A fine start

Kity Kirkpatrick she had fascinated her cousin’s tutor, Thomas Carlyle, who in his novel Sartor Resartus had based his heroine Blumine on her, ‘the fairest of Oriental light-bringers’. When Kitty finally is in contact with her grandmother the letters exchanged over continents revealed to her the narrative of her parents meeting and falling in love and the tragic fate of Khair un-Nissa. That this was a period not widely acknowledged when the British min- gled easily with the ‘natives’ and adopted their manners could make these cross-cultural marriages more common than is known. Dalrymple states in the Introduction of the book:

The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious bor- ders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written by the British before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India, . . . or for that matter by the post-colonial work coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow the path opened up by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering Orientalism.8

If John Thomas Keyt did indeed fall in love with a dancing girl we must note that the courtesans of the period were a repository of knowledge and culture. Mekhala Sengupta states:

The devdasi in ancient Hindu India who later morphed into the kothewali in Muslim India came to epitomise an independent woman artiste and connoisseur with a lifestyle encompassing both the erotic and artistry in not just the performing arts, but politics and persuasion as well.9

The case of the courtesan Umrao Jan immortalized in 1905 by Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa in his novel is the narrative of a five-year-old girl who is kidnapped and sold to a tawaif in Lucknow. Ruswa describes the beautiful courtesan’s mastery of Urdu poetry and her ability to write poetry and to her performances in dance and music as well as her wit and wisdom. Even more, according to Veena Talwar Oldenburg, the courtesan subverted male dominance and offered resistance to patriarchy where norms of traditional marriage reflected subjugation, denigration and exploitation.10

6 A fine start

To revert to the genealogy of the Keyts, George turned all this on its head and stated that he descended from the Rajputs of North India and that their original name was ‘Kirti’. The veracity of this fanciful belief need not be tested as it showed more than anything else his great desire to ally himself with India, a country whose cultural riches inspired him. But it also showed his disdain for the upper class and the stiff-upper lip Burgher culture which held itself above the rest.

Somebody to nobody George belonged to precisely this culture. The Burghers before Sri Lanka became independent were by and large a privileged class and to belong to it would mean access to a comfortable life. The country’s long history of colonial occupation meant there were more than one form of racial mix and the heterogeneity would invariably lead to differences: the ‘Dutch Burghers’ were the Dutch descendants the Burghers were the Dutch or the Portuguese where the latter were in some way considered inferior and the Eurasians were of British descent. To be a Euro-Asian was to be privileged and hence in politics many of them took a cautious, conservative stance on issues. Yet there were others who emerged as catalysts for mod- ernization and democratization and would on occasion be on the vanguard of the early anti-colonial challenge. The most radical among them were inspired by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, as well as with dissident intellectualism. As the scholar Kumari Jayawardena points out:

Rather than being ‘marginal’ to society they were utopian-like visionaries and agitators, active on important political and social issues long before the time was ripe for major reforms or social change. Their support was for nascent nationalism, feminism, plu- ralism, secularism, and the rights of workers and peasants. They also opposed those South Asian hierarchical formations based on caste, ethnicity, patriarchy and semi-feudal class structures.11

All the more ironic then that in the later years the cultural resources of the Euro-Asians were not appreciated and a form of demonization took place which turned them into virtual outcastes. Jayawardena observes, ‘In Sri Lanka, from the 1880’s onwards, the preoccupation of the early nationalists with “Aryanness” meant a demonizing of the “lower races” of other ethnic and religious origins, the valorizing of Sinhala Buddhism, and a demeaning of the “impure” Christian Euro-Asian.’12 Yet all that

7 A fine start

Figure 1.1 George Keyt. Courtesy: Martin Russell Archives.

hybridity with its rich cultural and political overtones brought with it was the impossibility of essentialism. Various accounts point to the colourful aura surrounding George’s great- grandfather and the fact that he is mentioned as someone who eloped with a Begum’s daughter and therefore had to flee India and seek refuge in Ceylon lend it some veracity if not historical accuracy. The first recorded introduction to his ancestors is his great-grandfather Henry Keyt who served in the Ceylon Civil Service and is mentioned by George himself in a letter to a close friend. He writes,

my great grandfather was brought out by the British for the Civil Service here and was a ‘native’ and became Colonial Secretary and was knighted too. . . . He married into the aristocratic Dutch family – one of them opting to stay back when Ceylon was ceded to England in 1796 – the Van Krickenbeecks, who were counts. So the

8 A fine start

lineage included other noble families. And he married my grandfather into the same family. The name became Europeanised.13

His grandson Henry Keyt, possibly named after him, was a surveyor work- ing in the Government Survey and Ordinance Department at Kandy. He seems to have been a man of learning and would read out both Shake- speare and Tennyson to young George who was both precocious and intel- ligent. George was known to make illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a poem which his father would read aloud to him. As a child George would be seen doing drawings of the Crucifixion in which a finely detailed crowd would be pressing around. According to a friend,

I remember that one of the Keyt pictures hanging in the drawing room of Harold’s house at Alfred House Gardens, which was to be the last house in Colombo to which the family moved was a large canvas entitled ‘Christ the King’. It showed Christ seated in an imposing and yet simple manner and I may be mistaken now, remembering it so many years later, but the Crown worn by him in some way recalled the Crown of thorns.14

George’s mother, Constance, was according to family accounts very indul- gent towards her son but he did not spare his view on her in his later years. He writes,

My mother, the most impossible person on earth, and trying hard to no purpose to disentangle herself from the high mightiness and irresponsible frivolity of the ‘high’ society she lived in as a young woman is now past eighty, and though very difficult and troublesome, is nevertheless quite sane. But vain, inquisitive, suspicious and so irresponsible in her ways and her speech, and so incapable of looking after herself, which she never had to do in all her life, that my sister won’t let her live away from her, and she lives on the premises, and is a constant source of worry and she alarms – not me anymore – the relatives, particularly abroad, by writing ghastly letters about accidents and so forth she’s been having.15

The house George lived in as a child was one which had been built by his grandfather, ‘heavy furnitured house . . . old style, built by my grandfather in 1860’.16 He had a sunny childhood redolent with family love

9 A fine start and richly endowed with folklore and animals, birds and friendships. He recalled how one morning his ayah Biso Menike, nostalgic for her village, smuggled him out of their residence and away to her village home. Until the end he remembered the aroma of cooking and wood smoke and the fond cuddling he received. He also remembered galloping around the garden on the strong shoulders of the Indian gardener, holding on to his turban and yelling with joy. Most of all he remembered his father presid- ing solemnly over the family dinners.17 George was perhaps the closest to his Uncle Vere, who was a Casanova of sorts and had ‘trysts with village maids with young George an intrigued bystander’. He also remembered a tearful governess being dismissed for being too familiar with his uncle.18 Perhaps his uncle was a source of inspiration for him to have trysts with village maidens in his adult life. George learnt to read and write only at the age of 10 and spent most of his time before that drawing and colouring. This would be a period of incubation where the rich subconscious sources of Keyt’s art with their powerful drawing from mythology and folk tales took place.

The early years As was inevitable with the upper classes in Kandy, George attended Trin- ity College where he met other boys of the principal families. His interest lay elsewhere though and he had little patience with the rigours of school discipline. His insubordination created a problem with the school author- ities and by 1918 he wanted to leave school and could not be persuaded to return. Recognizing his unusual talent, however, the principal Reverend A.G. Fraser and another teacher, Canon Houlder, persuaded his father to let him remain at home and Reverend L.G. Gaster allowed him to use the school library, a facility George availed of in full measure. In these early years George devoted himself to literary pursuits and always found it difficult to understand how the English colonial people he met at his father’s house could have sprung from the race of Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley. George had made sketches as a child but also focused on poetry. His leanings towards literature were well known and he spent many long years of his youth in reading the Classics. He constantly alludes to writers in his letters to friends. For instance, ‘I’ve been reading a bit of Kafka’s “Trial” and find I like it. Has that independent quality, free of time and space, like a dream, to me the true reality.’19 He also spoke of numerous other writers.

10 A fine start

In order to earn a little money Keyt worked for firms of photographers, where he would enhance the quality of negatives with his considerable skill with the brush. Seeing his talent his childhood friend, the culturally resourceful Lionel Wendt, encouraged him to devote himself solely to art. It was in 1927 that Keyt began to give up his other interests and to work on paintings in a concentrated manner after a brief course in the rudi- ments of art with the painter George de Niese. It was through Lionel that George also met C.F. Winzer, the Ceylon Government’s Inspector of art in the schools who was a painter himself. He was also a very vocal oppo- nent of official art in Ceylon that consisted of replications of mediocre Victorian and Edwardian attempts in naturalism. Winzer in his own work strove to bring about a synthesis of the ancient art of Ceylon to modern needs and in some measure did succeed. As he stated in his last address to the Ceylon Art Club in 1931:

Our materials are different, our conditions are different, the demands of the public are different, and the public must be trained and enlightened by us sufficiently, not only to appreciate our work, but also that of the past: which is appreciated actually as are relics, as signs of past greatness, but not out of time, as works of art. But in spite of all the differences of time, of con- dition, of presentment, the eternal qualities of art, as shown at Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, should be studied, adapted to our life, and a continuity with them achieved. I may add that this continuity is closer to the decorative conceptions of modern art than to the realistic, true-to-life prettiness and cheap harmonies of academic achievement.20

Ferment in art A major contributory factor in the genesis of the modern art movement in Sri Lanka, Charles Freegrove Winzer (1886–1940) arrived in Colombo in 1920 and was to live and work there for eleven years. He was an artist himself who had spent his youth in Paris at the time when Picasso and Matisse held the art world in their sway. As the Inspector of Art for Sri Lanka his understanding of art therefore enabled him to lay the foundation for a more vital movement which moved away from the mechanical mimetic work that had existed and towards an archiving of indigenous traditions which he felt were aligned to modernism in art.

11 A fine start

Winzer’s approach to art was different from that of the Ceylon Society of Arts, which dominated artistic activity in the island along with its most enthusiastic supporter Mudaliyer A.C.G.S. Amarasekera, the art teacher and academic portraitist. He began the Ceylon Art Club in the 1920s, which was in operation for a few years and existed until he left Ceylon in 1931. Artists who were unhappy with the ‘existing amenities’ were able to exhibit their work at the Art Club and aside from Beling and Keyt, Jus- tin Daraniyagala, David Paynter, D. Lokuge, R.W. Jayasinghe, R. Cana- gasaby and J.D.A. Perera were some of the other painters who displayed their work at the Club. Along with Lionel Wendt, Winzer stimulated and encouraged the talent he saw around him and this was to crystallize in the development of artists like George Keyt as well as the formation of the ’43 Group. Winzer’s vision was to leave an indelible mark on George Keyt’s works particularly between the period from 1927 to 1929. In Keyt’s early works like the Kandyan Scene (1927) we have a load bearer in a sarong and a colourful fruit seller accurately depicted but rather like an ethnographic study. It is as if action has been frozen to allow for a momentary scanning of the lives of the common folk. Panteru Dancers (1927) reveals two muscular figures in close-up sitting erectly with their musical instruments and the suspended moment here is almost as if they will soon break into a performance. The Kandyan Portrait (1927) of two stately ladies in their traditional costume against a backdrop of trees, veg- etation and hillocks reveals particular physiognomic characteristics while their body language is more fluid and seems to be breaking out of staticity into movement. In many of the pictures we are reminded of the sitting Buddha posture from the ancient site of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Dambulla where the beneficent calm of his expression is matched by his body posture of absolute stillness. The emphasis on the folds of the dress in the painting Kandyan Portrait also resonates Buddhist sculptures with their treatment of incised lines and raised ridges. The squatting Buddhas in Anuradhpura in particular according to the art historian Benjamin Rowland are the best of their kind in Asia and far outmatch his looming forms in Sri Lanka, which are a bit awkward in comparison. ‘The seated Buddha image from this early period of Singhalese sculpture are, if anything, more interest- ing and aesthetically moving than the examples of the standing type.’21 Speaking of the Buddha in the dyana mudra in the Colombo museum which was originally located in Anuradhpura he states, ‘In few other rep- resentations of the Buddha in yoga trance do we get such a sense of the complete self-absorption and serenity of the Enlightened One.’22

12 A fine start

It is with his first nude study that George throws aside the Winzerian influence to make a stunning work that is almost classical in its depiction of feminine grace and dignity. All the more so as the difficulty of getting a model to pose nude in Ceylon, a conservative country, was considerable. In a letter written to his friend Van Geyzel in 1933 he mentions how a friend’s niece who was Moorish suddenly lifted her dress in front of him and she was quite naked underneath. Although she was very embarrassed, ‘This was very welcome because in those days I had not yet got models. It was in 1925’23 (letter to Geyzel, from Senkadagalanuwa, 1933). With his Portrait of Govindamma (1928) where the nuanced tac- tile brown body creates an overpowering effect and her looming form is both human and god-like, we have the first of his studies of women which would later alter the course of his art. In contrast the fully clothed woman at the back is in repose and is contrasted with the frontal vividly alive Govindamma. In his mind it was quite clear. When asked later what he felt about ‘naked’ and ‘nude’ he said:

When you see, either in pictorial or sculptural depiction, a figure without clothing, and you just accept unquestioningly that figure to be just what it is, a thing in itself, naturally before you, like a tree or a flower; then it is a nude; e.g. unclothed women in Ingres, particularly the famous ‘Odalisque’, and in classical Helenistic sculpture etc. But on the other hand when you see the sort of painting or sculpture done in the raw, so to speak, direct and naturalistic, I should say, in some ways, a sort of art- expressed notice that they are just men and women who have taken off their clothes; then I think we use the term ‘naked’ e.g. some of Picasso’s paintings and drawings, and Courbet, Rubens, Rembrandt, etc. and the erotic colour woodcuts of Utamaro, and Hindu erotic sculpture, and that truly horrible statue of ‘David’ by Michelangelo of which Florence is so proud, and put up in public.24

And it is precisely this difference that is evident in this work where the nude is transformed into a form of poetry. The almost caressing tender- ness with which the woman emerges in this work would in some way be the predecessor to the many paintings of women, almost sublime in their nudity and without any artifice. This work marked the end of his naturalistic period. From now onwards there would be no looking back.

13 A fine start

Notes 1 John Clifford Holt (ed.), The Sri Lanka Reader, History, Culture, Politics, Duke Univer- sity Press, Durham, NC, 2011, p. 29. 2 Mentioned in ‘Afterword’ by Christopher Ondaattje, in Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf, originally published in 1913. Reprinted by Eland Publishing Limited, London, 2008, p. 205. 3 Mentioned in Woolf Ibid., p. 203. 4 Ondaatje, ‘Afterword’, op. cit., p. 205. 5 Martin Russell Archives, London. 6 Account sent by Diana Keyt by email on July 18, 2014. 7 George Keyt: Nursery Rhymes for My Daughter Diana, Vijitha Yapa Publications, Sri Lanka, 2013, no pagination. 8 William Dalrymple, The White Mughals, Penguin Books, India, 2002. 9 Courtesan Culture in India, IIC Quarterly Summer, 2014. 10 Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 1990, www.columbia.edu/itc/ mealac/Pritchett/oourdu/umraojan/txt_veena_oldenburg.html. 11 Kumari Jayawardena, Erasure of the Euro-Asian, Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2009, p. ii. 12 Ibid., p. 4. 13 Letter to Barbara from Gunnepana, June 14, probably 1953. 14 Sheelagh Goonewardene, A Personal View of George Keyt, publication not mentioned. 15 Letter to Barbara from Gunnepana, June 12, 1953. 16 Letter to Martin Russell from Sirimalwatta, April 20, 1985. 17 Mentioned in ‘The Lives of Keyt’ by Tissa Devendra, Observer Pictorial, Colombo, 1991, p. 19. 18 Ibid. 19 Letter to Len Van Geyzel, June 8, 1937. 20 Quoted in George Keyt, Martin Russell, Marg, Mumbai, 1950, p. 40. 21 Benjamin Rowland, The Art and Architecture of India, Penguin Books, Baltimore, MD, 1967, p. 364. 22 Ibid. 23 Letter to Geyzel from Senkadagalanuwa, 1933. 24 Letter to Martin Russell, March 22, 1982.